Afghan-Canadian artist Hangama Amiri challenges herself and her art by moving to different places.

The places that speak to her can be a fog-bound harbour in Lunenburg, a shipyard parking lot in Halifax or a dusty street in Kabul.

“I believe as an artist the place we inhabit, the surroundings, the experiences, affects our art,” says Amiri, talking in her light and airy studio on Lunenburg’s King Street.

“As an artist I’m always moving. I can never stay in one place for long, physically or artistically.”

Amiri is moving at the end of June to Halifax where her exhibit, Pastoral & Industrial, opens at Hermes Gallery, 5682 North St., Thursday, 5 to 8 p.m.

In August, she heads to New York City to do a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University.

Duality runs through Amiri’s life and art. Her earth-toned Afghan paintings are figurative and feminist as they tell the stories of Afghan women and their struggles.

Her blue and green Canadian paintings are landscapes and cityscapes based on memory and imagination. They straddle abstraction and representation, negative and positive space, drawing and painting.

Amiri's Somewhere in Long Lake (MITCH WARD)

Amiri was born in Afghanistan. Her family fled the Taliban when she was a child, seeking refuge in Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Russia.

“When I left Afghanistan I used to just draw my childhood memories, the places where I used to play, my classmates. That began my artistic passion and my sister’s as well.”

When her family settled in Halifax, she won scholarships to attend NSCAD University and she earned her 2012-13 place in the NSCAD Lunenburg Community Studio program with her paintings on Afghan-feminism, The Wind-Up Dolls of Kabul.

She has continued to go to Afghanistan to make art and wants to have an independent solo show there.

She wants the Afghan people to see her work.

“That’s my biggest victory. The place is dangerous for regular people. It is always dangerous. We are artists, we have to take risks.

“I think art can change the social problems. Art has that unique power; it attracts a lot of people.”

Amiri's Summer Ride (MITCH WARD)

Her new ink, acrylic and oil paintings in Pastoral & Industrial grow out of her Topophilia series, shown at the Corridor Gallery in Halifax in December, and her Lunenburg series, At the Edge of the Shore, exhibited last year at quilt artist Laurie Swim’s gallery. (Swim named her the 2013 Portia White Protege when she won the Portia White Prize.)

In Lunenburg, Amiri went out into nature.

“It’s important to devote my time to being a Canadian artist, and nature plays a really big role in Canadian art history.”

She looked at contemporary landscape painters like Kim Dorland who challenge the traditional Group of Seven style.

“Nature really connects me in order to know about the place.”

She went outdoors, picked up found objects, sketched, noted down colours. Green is everywhere outdoors in Lunenburg in the summer and strong in her paintings.

For this show, she wanted to combine cityscape and landscape. She went to the Macdonald bridge in Halifax and looked down with a “God’s eye” view at the shipyards. She fell in love with endless, empty parking lots.

Amiri's View from the Bridge (MITCH WARD)

She liked the one-point perspective, the depth of field, the fact that everything is “so mathematical in the city.”

Her large painting Shipyard takes the grey, lined parking lots back to a distant point. The buildings on either side are not painted in detail; they look like abstract colour fields and are painted in the “everyday” colours she made note of that day.

Amiri went to the rail bridge in south-end Halifax and looked down at the railway tracks, which vanish in the distance. This painting, also large, “started with a screen print in a dark brown colour and I squeegee it off and you get these amazing negative spaces.”

She leaves the white geometric spaces free of paint.

“I like negative space. I like to have a space to breathe in my paintings.”

She poured on green screen print ink for the mass of vegetation and drew marks in it with the edge of the squeegee.

Amiri's Waiting for a Train (MITCH WARD)

“It looks very Persian. I can read a word, but it’s also very abstract. These paintings are all about painting and drawing at the same time.”

The rail painting was “too green for me.” She added small yellow geometric shapes to the green mass to “keep your eye warm and moving,” she says.

“It needed a last touch. Last touches in a painting are very important.”

Amiri works within a square frame.

“It’s like a box; it’s hard to enter and to get out of sometimes. I love painting in it because it is a very challenging space.”

One of her paintings is a small birch panel about fog. It has a central vertical swoosh in thick grey-blue brush marks, balanced by a precise drawing of an abandoned seaside building.

While it is “fictional” and painted from memory, it is inspired by her run every morning in Lunenburg on an abandoned rail trail that puts her on top of a hill.

“It is a beautiful way of looking at Lunenburg. You get on top of the world and see everything. There’s a really horizontal line, very foggy; it’s usually very powerful.

When she works on a painting, she has a “conversation” with it. Usually it’s a “nice relationship,” but Amiri stops in front of a highly abstract watery painting and looks at it coldly. She’s unsure if it’ll go in the Hermes show.

“This is not a friendly painting for me, but I’m working on it.”

This is her last series on Nova Scotia and landscape before she goes to New York, where she will make a body of work about Afghan feminism.

She and her sister, filmmaker and NSCAD grad Fazila Amiri, collaborated on a performance art video, Dome of Secret Desires (2012), that they shot in an abandoned war-torn building in Kabul.

They each took turns performing as a burka-clad woman practising with an object of her desire, such as lipstick, high heels or a hookah, all forbidden by the Taliban. The video was shortlisted at the seventh International Arte Laguna Prize in Venice.

Amiri plans to go back and forth to Afghanistan and to return to Nova Scotia. Right now, she is keen to get to New York.

“I really want to see my work in the U.S. and see my role as an artist in this really busy zone that New York City is. That’s the city waiting for me to see how far I can go and how much it brings challenges to my work. It might give me a new perspective. I’m waiting for that.”